Retirement Watch Weekly
Estate Planning Strategies for Asset Ownership
When your estate planning aims to help a grandchild financially, especially for college, an important question is: Who should own the assets? In fact, answering this question can be harder than determining how much money you should set aside and how it should be invested. Deciding who should own the property means looking at several […]
Tip-Toeing Into the Second Home Market
The signs are we’re in or nearing a good time to look at a vacation home or a property in a vacation area. I don’t think we’re entering a new real estate boom, so don’t expect buying now will set you up for big capital gains in a few years. I’ve been saying that residential […]
Avoiding Costly IRA Blunders
IRAs are among the most valuable assets most people own, and they become more valuable after receiving 401(k) rollovers. But they aren’t the s vehicles they seemed when people were opening them. There are many misunderstandings about IRAs. These misunderstandings frequently result in taxes and penalties that easily could be avoided. IRAs aren’t the simple […]
Planning Taxes in a Transition Period
We’re hurtling toward the fiscal cliff. Tax increases across the board are scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2013. In addition, a number of tax breaks expired at the end of 2011 and still haven’t been extended. (See our February 2012 visit for details.) Congress, at least at the moment, doesn’t seem inclined to […]
What’s Wrong with 401(k) Plans
The 401(k) revolution isn’t increasing retirement security for most employees. I don’t know many people who dispute that. But the real question is: Why aren’t 401(k) plans working. Of course, two reasons are employee behavior. They don’t save enough, and they don’t invest. But another problem, according to this post, is that most 401(k) plans […]
Beginning Social Security Benefits
More and more people are interested in the right time to begin Social Security benefits, and we’ve been leaders at Retirement Watch informing people how to make that decision. You can obtain a copy of my report on the subject on the web site. Yet, many financial advisors still aren’t well-versed in the details of […]
Money Market Changes Delayed
The Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman wants to reform money market funds, and Congress ordered the SEC to do so. I’ve covered the proposals in the past here and in Retirement Watch. The main proposals were to remove the ability of the funds to report a $1 per share value when the values of their […]
Why So Many People End Up Poor In Retirement
There’s a lot of discussion about the number of Americans who enter retirement financially prepared. There are surveys of people that give their self-assessments of their financial position. There are studies of data obtained from the IRS or the Federal Reserve. But one study points out that all these views take the wrong approach. They […]
